


Against the Tide

by Ms_Chunks



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Hands are important, Low Chaos (Dishonored), M/M, Other, Squinty shipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 21:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7191659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ms_Chunks/pseuds/Ms_Chunks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Outsider and Corvo engage in a debate as to why he is so *interesting*.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Against the Tide

**Author's Note:**

> Written on the spurring of a friend and her passion for The Outsider, which I cannot argue with.

He asks.

“Do you know _why_ you are special, Corvo?”

The Lord Protector stares for a moment, then shakes a blank face. Even now he wears a mask, though this one is more subtle. The Outsider still sees through it.

“Because of the decisions you make.”

Corvo puts down the spoon with which he has been shovelling stew into his mouth, and rubs a hand over days’ stubble.

“All people make decisions,” he remarks in that deceptively lyrical voice; his homeland lends him a musical lilt no amount of hardship can erode. “Many without choice in the matter.”

“Ah, but you have a choice – don’t you? It is your choices that make you so _interesting_.” From any other creature the word could be considered complementary, but from The Outsider it is an abyssal curiosity. The kind that drives people to tear things apart to see how they work, without any idea of how or _if_ the pieces go back together.

“Give me your hand,” he commands, proffering his own with a beckoning waggle of his fingers. Corvo glares suspiciously. “Don’t be like that,” he cajoles, “I’ll give it back.”  
  
Something suggests he is not being facetious. Rather than test his temper, Corvo offers up his brand with reservation written between the lines on his brow.

The feeling as The Outsider takes his hand stretches description to its limits, but could be summarised with the key points ‘cold’ and ‘writhing’. Turning his insignia towards the earth, he spreads Corvo’s palm like unfurling a parchment.

“It is all written here, of course,” he remarks as a matter of fact. Corvo tugs his hand as if to take it back, but it might as well be on whaling hooks.

“Reading palms is a fortune teller’s ruse,” he dismisses as the Outsider runs fingertips delicately over the lines of his palm.

“Oh Corvo,” he hums like a tuning fork. “You are supposed to be a wise man. Did it not occur to you that the charlatans might just be flogging a mimicry of the truth?” He cups one hand under his knuckles and pools cold fingertips in the middle of Corvo’s palm. “It is not their fault they cannot interpret what they see.” The pressure on his hand increases, like someone is driving a drill through it. “Besides,” he adds with mischief glinting across his endless eyes, “all languages must be translated.”  
  
In an instant the rasping scream of the void rushes around them, and Corvo tries to rip his hand away to no avail. His arm might as well be marble, chiselled with grooves to carry the liquid darkness that pours from the Outsider’s fingertips along each line of his palm, splintering down the pathways etched into his skin.

“There is only one choice.” The inky darkness runs over Corvo’s palm, agonising yet fulfilling, like an itch that had never been scratched. “Life. Death.” Images flash unbidden through his mind; whales hauled up screaming on hooks and hacked at while they thrash, men staring down both ends of a firing squad, children too cold to stay awake. “Few creatures make it for themselves,” he almost seems to chant, like half an echo. Corvo gags but doesn’t, can’t, move.

“You have made the decision for so many.” The Outsider tells the story as if he’s new to the events of his own life, while the darkness spills over the end of his palm and into the veins of his wrist, stretching down his arm with bluish luminosity under his skin. “In the midst of a great culling you strived to do the opposite – preserve life, _always_ , even at risk to your own.”  
  
Corvo can no longer see the creeping darkness which has reached under his sleeves, but feels it in his arm, along his collarbone, up his neck. His eyes cloud and he can taste iron and bloodlust; the impulse to extinguish a life that has not been deserved or appreciated. It is a familiar companion, but one that must be turned away at the door.

“And _this_ is why you fascinate me so,” the Outsider sing-songs, reaching with his free hand for the opening of Corvo’s shirt, persuading buttons out of their resting places with a magician’s touch. “Look at you.”  
  
Corvo swallows bitter saliva, and like he’s been bound up with cables forces his chin downwards. His chest, pocked by scars, is woven with a net of black ribbons cut off just when they seem about to converge.

“Have you not wondered why so many of my followers lose themselves?” The Outsider poses conversationally, like he hasn’t got Corvo bound up in a strait jacket.

“You drive them to madness,” he answers, forcing the words out from the back of his throat.

“So sure,” is the riposte, “and yet so wrong. Do you really think that little of me?” He seems to take it personally.

“Quite the opposite.” The invasion of his body has settled into an occupation that he can withstand. He’s endured worse torture. “You overwhelm them.” The point makes itself, at which the Outsider flashes a sick grin.

“A single man cannot hold back the tide.”

“You are not the tide,” he counters, taking breaths like protest against the weight on his chest. It is not that much worse than sleeping with Emily sprawled atop him; more common an occurrence than Calista would like, but he is the only relic that can chase away the nightmares of an Empress, apparently.

“No?” The Outsider is puzzled by this.

“No.” Corvo catches a point of roughness in his voice, like a knot in wood that must be polished out.

“Then tell me,” he asks with what could be called sincerity, if he should feel anything like them, and if it could be anything like that. “Why not?”  
  
Corvo looks straight into bottomless eyes before uttering the edict.

“The tide retreats.” The Outsider pushes his fingers down on Corvo’s palm, as if to test him, and he feels the push deep inside; a pressure on his chest like he’s under a rock on the ocean floor. He has had worse, but only just.  
  
When he doesn’t yield, the crushing weight subsides and The Outsider cuts a wicked smile, like it has been carved with a newly sharpened razor. This has pleased him.

“It was as true for Burrows as it was for Havelock,” he begins to recite, like their entire dialogue has been predetermined. “Power corrupts, and absolute power-”

“Corrupts absolutely,” Corvo breaks the pattern; it does not happen all too often, going by his expression. “I am familiar with the saying.”

“Of course you are,” he replies with a self-satisfied smirk. “And yet, you – who sits so close to power, who tucks it into bed at night. You alone remain uncorroded.”

“My duty-”

“It is so much more than that,” he interrupts with triumph, and then runs a fingertip along one of the pathways mapped in darkness across Corvo’s chest, all the way to its abrupt end. “You will not let anyone in.” A finger remains positioned between two of Corvo’s ribs, waiting on a doorstep of his heart. “Not even me.”

“No.”

“No?” An eyebrow raises.

“That room has long since been locked.”

“As I see.” He pauses only a moment. “You will let me in – in the end.” Corvo shakes his head at great cost, yet pityingly. “Oh, but you will,” he insists. “Some last days, as you call them, others years, but everyone succumbs eventually.” He draws his fingertips upward across Corvo’s skin and it feels like he’s pulling the blood through his arteries with a magnet. “At some point, it won’t be enough, and you will give yourself to me. Completely.”  
  
Slowly, like pushing a boulder uphill, Corvo raises his free hand and wraps blanched fingers around the Outsider’s wrist as it presses into his palm. With shaking hands, he slowly but surely pulls the contact apart and the wind-tunnel rush in his ears quietens.

The Outsider seems truly shocked, cut off with four fingertips pressed into the soft spot underneath Corvo's collarbone.

“Ah,” he remarks to childlike wonder, “did you not say I was special?”


End file.
